The discussion of any work, publications, sales, or activity anywhere in this submission, including in any documents submitted with this application, shall not be taken as an admission that any such work constitutes prior art. The discussion of any activity, work, or publication herein is not an admission that such activity, work, or publication existed or was known in any particular jurisdiction.
Some earlier work discusses or employs various methods that allow consumers to “declare what they want” in order to receive offers from sellers. The intrinsic methods and results vary a lot, for example according to: 1—how consumers “declare what they want” and how this information is processed, 2—how the “declarations” are diffused, analyzed and processed into offers by supply chain agents and 3—the context of how the results (offers) are presented to the consumers that “declared what they want”.
A wide spread prior art is the “Want ads”, exemplified at iWant.com patent U.S. Pat. No. 6,574,608, in this method people ad the need of a general or specific product, a central system delivers the ads to sellers, then sellers search (the list of ads), reading prospective ads and answering them (sending offers) one by one.
Another prior art method is the Request For Proposal (RFP), a standard way for buyers to request offers form sellers, in this method buyers send RFP to sellers, and sellers respond them one by one. For example, according to Fujistu Limited's patent U.S. Pat. No. 6,686,392, consumers send their RFP to an electronic shopping system, which has an electronic shopping agent (ESA), the ESA will send the RFP to respective sellers, then sellers forward proposals to the ESA, and the ESA analyze the proposals forwarding the best proposals to the requesting consumers.
Another popular prior art are the buyer-driven systems, where a good example is the conditional purchase offer (CPO) family of patents such as patent U.S. Pat. No. 6,085,169, at those methods a buyer dictates the terms of the offer and one or more sellers decide whether to accept or not, however buyers are bind to their offers by their credit card. In this method, sellers predetermined their offers' rules of acceptance, so when a CPO meets the requirement of the offers' rules (say fly destination, date and price) the system automatically fulfills the transaction. Another buyer-driven method is the reverse-auction; at www(.)freemarkets(.)com, for example sellers bid for each buyer's specific purchase/contract.
Another interesting prior art is Mark Landesmann, patent application publication No. US 2002/0052779, named serious intent mechanism and method, where sellers receive “declaration of intent to purchase a good or service” using methods to discern what consumers have higher likelihood to purchase and thus giving them more attention and better service.
Finally, a further example of prior art method that somehow makes the future demand for general or specific products transparent is the analysis of users' queries at shopping websites, assuming that increase in the number of queries of a product means increase of demand for that product. Shopping.com's consumer demand index (CDI), measures the variation (percentage) in the number of queries for products and display them by graphics and lists, shown on FIG. 3. This method only represents possible trends and a sign for potential sales; it provides neither a means of communication among sellers and buyers (like the invention's DIB process does), nor a marketing tool for sellers that allows specific segmentation, targeting and offers creation.